Perceptions Of Femininity In Early Irish Society

An examination of how the feminine was viewed in early medieval Ireland, through a careful study of a range of texts.

"This volume of essays, which includes papers first given at a conference of the Irish Association for Research in Women's History, represents a fresh approach to the discussion of the position of women in Ireland in the Middle Ages: it attempts to set the experience of Irish women into a wider, European context. This comparative approach makes it possible to shake off the image of isolation and idiosyncrasy that has for too long clung to many aspects of medieval Irish society, and especially to the subjects of women and marriage." "A secondary theme of the volume is the extent to which women, in Ireland and outside, were able to take the initiative and make their interests and wishes count in the societies in which they lived. A number of the essays discuss the sources for the history of women and use them in new ways to recover what is possible of the lives and experiences of medieval women." "A combination of essays by established academics and younger scholars, covering literary topics as well as political, social and legal conditions as they affected women, the volume presents the results of recent research and represents very much the 'cutting edge' of scholarly work on medieval women, especially, but not exclusively, in Ireland."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"This book disperses the shadows in an obscure but important landscape. Lisa Bitel addresses both the history of women in early Ireland and the history of myth, legend, and superstition which surrounded them. It is a powerful and exact book and an invaluable addition to our expanding sense of Ireland through the eyes of Irish women."--Eavan Boland, author of In a Time of Violence: Poems"It is refreshing to read in a book by a woman on medieval women that not all clerics hated women and that not all men were oversexed villains consciously bent on exploiting women. [Bitel] challenges not only the medieval Irish male construct of female behavior, but she is also courageous enough to question constructs of medieval women invented by modern Irish medieval historians."--Times Higher Education Supplement

This collection of articles poses the question: What can gender history add to the traditional narrative of Irish history? How can it help us to understand the ways in which power operated in and flowed through Irish society? It is premised on the assumption that men and women are actors in the creation of their society, influenced by the ideology of the period, but also challenging and resisting the assumptions and beliefs of their era. The articles included in this collection are far-ranging and thematically diverse, united by the common theme of gender. While women play a dominant role in its pages, it makes visible the power and presence of men. Sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit, the history written on these pages is a history of the ways in which women and men constructed, negotiated and made visible the roles, ideas and representations that governed their particular society. In so doing, it provides an alternative reading to the traditional narrative of Irish history. This book focuses mainly on the modern period and includes two articles from outside of Ireland which provides a comparative focus. It also includes a theoretical introductory section on the nature of gender history from three leading Irish historians.

Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions explores the traditions of two fascinating and contiguous cultures in north-western Europe. History regularly brought these two peoples into contact, most prominently with the Viking invasion of Ireland. In the famous Second Battle of Moytura, gods such as Lug, Balor, and the Dagda participated in the conflict that distinguished this invasion. Pseudohistory, which consists of both secular and ecclesiastical fictions, arose in this nexus of peoples and myth and spilled over into other contexts such as chronological annals. Scandinavian gods such as Odin, Balder, Thor, and Loki feature in the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the history of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus. This volume explores such written works alongside archaeological evidence from earlier periods through fresh approaches that challenge entrenched views.

This study explores the lives of religious women of the early Celtic Church in Ireland through the eyes of the hagiographers. Few Lives of Irish women saints remain, thus much use has been made of the numerous references to women found in the Lives of men. Other genres of Irish texts have also been consulted. While the Irish hagiographical genre cannot, except rarely, be regarded as an accurate historical record of individuals, it does, at the very least, reflect a view of the world familiar either to the writer or to their sources. It is thus through an analysis of the attitudes and assumptions of these early writers that some idea of the daily lives of holy women emerges. Although much time has been spent during this exploration upon a reconstruction of daily routine through a collation of the data available as an alluvial depository source, considerable time has also been spent examining the use of metaphor in the above genre. This has been particularly helpful in the attempt made here to shed some new light upon the spiritual life of religious women. This latter methodological approach has also been of particular benefit in determining the limits of the power and status enjoyed by these women within Irish society. In the final analysis, it is evident from the picture which emerges that these women played an important and often very active role in the life of the Church.

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 2,0, University of Bamberg, course: Coming Into Clover, language: English, abstract: This paper is about how Mary Lavin deals with the complexity of being a born American writing about Irish women in Ireland, and by taking her short story "A Memory" as an example. The questions this study deals with are: How is femininity represented in "A Memory"? Does the American born author Mary Lavin follow the traditional picture of Irish women in Irish literature and its historical context? What are her motives for doing or not doing so? For as much as there are Irish female authors, they represent a minority. When revising different anthologies of literature coming from Ireland though, one is predestined to encounter Mary Lavin’s name in at least most of them. Lavin was born in America, and that might also contribute to the fact, that she stood out between so many male writers. As published by Daphne Wolf in an Irish America magazine issue of 2013, “In the male-dominated field of Irish writers, Mary Lavin was a pioneer” (60), it is of no minor relevance to focus on her work, and how she, herself, as an Irish-American avant-gardist female author, created women in the Irish literature. This research will firstly analyze the short story "A Memory" and the definition Lavin gives there to femininity in both a formal perspective, taking in count the story’s narrative point of view, style and theme, and its content, like the plot and the conflict of the story. Secondly, it will explain the role and position of women in the Irish society through its literature and authors, and it will explore the historical events in which women were involved during the 1960’s and 1970‘s that is the time when "A Memory" was published (1973). For this, relevant pieces of information of Irish history and analysis of Irish literature will serve to answer to the question. In the third place, this work will compare the results to Mary Lavin’s background in order to give a concise explanation for her motives, if the fact of being a born American woman has an influence in her perspective of femininity, and how she transfers that into Irish literature. Lavin’s biography and articles about her, such as her obituary, are relevant for the study.